Stark's provocative essay maintains that contrary to the opinion of
social scientists, upper classes and not the poor embraced asceticism and poverty throughout
the Christian Middle Ages and later. The contention that the
social phenomena of transvaluation or deprivation was at work among the poor
-- meaning that the poor made poverty a virtue from their own circumstances
and necessity -- is false. No evidence supports this, while painstaking
analysis of historical records shows that the wealthy populated the ranks of
ascetics throughout history.

The situation exists even today, where the average attendee at Sunday
religious services continues to be the privileged well-to-do, regardless of
sectarian preference. The option for asceticism is similar.

It is the opportunity to choose poverty -- a choice not given to the poor
-- that seems central to the appeal of asceticism. Fasting seems not to
appeal to people who have often been hungry and privation in general fails
to attract the poor. In contrast, it is frequently observed that wealth
fails to satisfy many of those born into privilege and therefore they turn
to various religious or even radical political alternatives.

Stark's representative historical examples (he specifically demurs from
using a psychological approach) are Buddhism, Orphics and Pythagoreans,
Essenes, Cathars, and Waldensians. The Buddha is presented by history as a prince, and
the spread of Buddhism in China entailed the evolution of a priestly class
of the educated. The ancient Greek sects cited followed ascetic practices
and were associated with the writing of books. Recruits among the Essenes
were expected to bring property to commingle with the community, and besides
their ritual practices they composed complex and advanced theological commentaries
reflecting their elite members. The leadership of the Cathars were
perfecti -- celibates abstaining from flesh. A roster of all 1,1190 of
the the perfecti exists, with 15 percent of them nobility, and many others of affluent
families. Finally, the Waldensians were founded by a wealthy merchant named
Waldo of Lyons, who renounced all his wealth and preached asceticism in the
Lyon streets, soon attracting a large following that spread beyond France.

The Cathars and Waldensians came into conflict with Church authorities
not because they led a proletarian or peasant subversion of doctrine.
Heretical thinking came later. The motive of their asceticism was originally
distrusted by a Church determined to be the sole arbitrator of pious
practice, and so the charge of heresy would evolve from this antagonism.

Medieval Christian society consisted of authorities within the
ecclesiastical hierarchy and the vast laity that included urban poor and
peasants. Religious orders always functioned as what Stark calls the "Church
of Piety," with potential for antagonism with the hierarchy. From this
"church" came the pious wealthy and their allies, the wealthy orders.

The rest of the article presents the author's work quantifying the
social origins of ascetic saints of Europe from 500 to 1500. Few such
efforts have preceded his; Stark uses over a dozen sources, including standard almanacs such as
Butler's The Lives of Saints. His criteria excludes obscure
saints known only through hagiographical sources, and excludes saints
only made so because of martyrdom, miracles, ecclesiastical position (such as
bishop or pope), patrons, children, and
scholars. Stark includes only
truly ascetic saints.

The author considered nine variables confirmed by other research sources: sex,
century, family background, saintly kin, church office, order, extreme
degree of asceticism, eremitical status, and reported mystical phenomena.
Four aspects of asceticism were considered, with a pool of 483 saints
reflecting the percentages shown:

living
within a religious order

87.8
percent

extremely
ascetic

37.9

hermit or
recluse

25.1

mystic

11.4

The category of extreme asceticism included over a third of those already
deemed ascetic. Extreme asceticism refers to practices such as wearing a
hair shirt, living on bread and water, sleep deprivation, continuous prayer.

But one of the most common forms of extreme asceticism was to limit human
contact by becoming hermits or recluses. To gain solitude, hermits typically
withdrew into the forest or the desert. Recluses, on the other had, achieved
solitude by confining themselves in huts or cells (usually in or near a
monastery or convent). I many instances, recluses actually had their cells
walled-off and received food through a small opening.

The recluse mentioned by Stark is the anchorite or anchoress. It is
interesting to see Stark's assessment of eremitism as an extreme in itself,
however.

Lest it be thought that hermits and recluses were drawn mainly from among
the ranks of socially maladjusted misanthropes or even the mentally ill, as
is often claimed [referring to William James's The Varieties of Religious
Experience], nearly 20 percent of those coded as hermits or recluses
subsequently were called from their forests and cells to serve quite
successfully as bishops, abbots, and abbesses. For example, St. Aigulf lived
for many years as a hermit near Bourges, France before being called upon to
serve as bishop of that city. He subsequently played a leading part in
several Church councils. Many other hermits and recluses were asked to take
such administrative posts, but managed to beg off. Still others wrote lucid
works of scholarship or fine poetry. Clearly, then, in this era choosing
solitude mainly reflected religious motives, not maladjustment: Solitude was
regarded not only as a way to avoid worldly distractions.

The breakdown of asceticism criteria by gender shows that among 483
ascetic saints:

male

female

numbers:

337

146

percentages:

living within a religious order

84.9

94.5

extremely ascetic

39.8

33.6

hermit or recluse

28.2

17.8

mystic

8.3

18.5

And the data supporting Stark's main thesis, that ascetic saints were
overwhelmingly of the upper classes:

Royalty

Nobility

Wealthy

Lower

Unknown

male

13.1

55.2

17.2

5.3

9.2

female

42.5

47.9

5.5

3.4

0.7

percentage of total

21.9

53

13.7

4.8

6.6

Royalty includes kings, queens, princes, and princesses. Nobility means
dukes, counts, barons, earls, and their spouses and children. These classes
represent 75 percent or three-fourths of the ascetic saints. Wealthy
families were simply untitled landholders. Only one in twenty were from the
lower classes.

Stark further breaks down family background to the asceticism criteria:

Royalty

Nobility

Wealthy

Lower

TOTALS

numbers:

106

256

66

23

451

percentages:

in a religious order

96.2

85.2

87.9

78.3

extremely ascetic

35.8

34

53

34.8

hermit or recluse

20.8

23

33.3

21.7

mystic

6.6

10.2

10.6

39.1

another saint in
the immediate family

30.2

18

4.5

0

The intrigue results of the study show that ascetic saints come from
upper-class family backgrounds. Updated to modern times, the study would
show a decline in royal families but also a decline in asceticism among
religious orders. The increased number of saints from lower class families
would be the result of particular efforts to canonize them, though this
trend too has been uneven. But that is for modern times.

Stark makes some important points:

To refute the deprivation thesis it is not necessary that asceticism, or
other forms of religiousness, be an especially upper class phenomenon -- it
is sufficient that class be of little or no significance. However, I incline
to the view that the ascetic impulse is more prevalent among persons of
privilege, sometimes reflecting guilt about having wealth, but more often
stemming from the "discovery" that wealth is not fulfilling. Andrew Greeley
pointed out to me that "it was only the nobility who had the time and
opportunity to become saints" as the peasants were too busy trying to
scratch out a living. Exactly! Hungry peasants are starving, not fasting.
Deprivation is asceticism only when it is voluntary and that does tend to
limit it to those with the privilege, even the burden, of choice.

Today, an upper class does not exist in the medieval sense of aristocracy
-- only as wealth and celebrity. Asceticism has virtually disappeared. The
modern analogy may be among political and spiritual radical youth of wealthy
family backgrounds, who pursued and pursue modern equivalents of ascetic
ideas (if not practice) through their advocacy, disenchantment with modern
social values, or their embrace of religious and spiritual movements that
still do offer ascetic values. But even now these ranks do not include the
lower classes.